My name is David Jesse. I'm a reporter here at The News and just got back from Scarlett to see these comments.

Several people at the event - including multiple students who spoke - talked about Obama's legacy, and used that specific word. They mentioned that they were inspired by him, especially because he is the first black man elected president.

User Seipelta just posted this comment over in the listings of all the teachers and other school employees that made over $75,000 and I wanted to make sure others saw it.

"I think it is completely unethical for David Jesse and the Ann Arbor News to publish this information in the paper and on-line. As a state employee, I was just as outraged and felt the same violation when the Lansing State Journal published a database of State Employee's personal and pay information. The difference, I had thought prior to reading this today, was the LSJ was a smut mag with no integrity. Now I see the Ann Arbor News ranks right up there.
Did you ever wonder why teachers, police officers, child protective service investigators and such have unpublished phone numbers?
Have you ever been the victim of identity theft? Domestic violence? Stalking?
Most likey not, but you may have just endangered many who have.
Good job, be proud, and have someone ready to count the # of cancelled subscriptions."

Kiertsen Chapman, a teacher in Saline, sent the following letter into the paper. She agreed to let me publish it here:

As I sit in my classroom on yet another beautiful Sunday afternoon, I want to thank you for the articles concerning teacher salaries. It seems every few years this topic comes up, especially when districts are negotiating their teacher contracts. Most often complaints regarding "excessive" teacher salaries and benefits are given by those who are not related to someone in the teaching profession. I have yet to meet someone who is related to a teacher (or close friends with a teacher), that believes we are overpaid and
under-worked. The "three months off" phrase is batted about like we have somehow fooled the community into paying us a lot of money as we laugh all the way to our million-dollar cottages up North for the summer. Nothing could be further from the truth.
When salaries and benefits are itemized it is clear that teachers in this area make a very healthy wage. What is not clear is the number of hours spent working outside of our contractual workday (10-15 for me which is a 50+ work week) and the amount of personal money spent on our classrooms (I average $900 per year).
I just finished tallying my hours spent working this summer "because I chose to"ˆ and they total nearly 123 hours for 8 weeks (I did take the last two weeks of June off). When my pay for the club I advise is divided by the number of hours worked during and after the school year, I make about .11 cents per hour. Add to the time spent working past the school day the classes that I am required to take to maintain my certification, and there is another 5 or more hours spent on my job for a total of a 55-65 hour work week. I don't recall reading about lawyers or doctors or factory workers who are required to maintain continuing education credits to retain their job,
or the mounds of papers that they bring home just to stay on top of their workload.
Please let those who are upset at our large salaries and excessive benefit packages know that they are welcome to job shadow us for a day to understand what we do. Better yet, come join our profession. To borrow from the Peace Corps "it‚s the toughest job you'll ever love" and I didn't go into it for the money.
Kiersten Chapman
English Teacher/Transitions Coordinator

A quick primer on FOIA law: You can only use it to get information about people's salaries who are paid by taxpayer dollars, which I'm not and neither are those who work at newspapers.

The intent behind this article was to show how taxpayer dollars are used to pay teachers and other school employees. I'm not making any judgement calls on that, and I think if you read the articles, you'll see that I presented several different sides of the argument.

As for state of Michigan publication bulletin 1014, here's a link to it. http://www.michigan.gov/mde/0,1607,7-140-6530_6605-21514--,00.html

Brit Satchwell, one of the AAPS teachers quoted in these stories, posted this in another blog entry. Thought I'd copy it here so you don't miss it.

Full disclosure: I'm Brit Satchwell, one of the AAPS teachers quoted in Mr. Jesse's article, but I'm wearing my A2 parent and taxpayer hats right now. I prefer not to blog anonymously.

All aspects of public education need to be constantly at the forefront of public discussion, regardless of whether times are fat or lean. Right now, times are lean (state budget crisis) and teacher compensation is an important piece of our ongoing budget puzzle.

Mr. Jesse has raised some tough but key questions, and I look forward to more in upcoming articles (ex: merit pay). But for now, what makes a good teacher and what is fair pay? Answer: I dunno. The real answers will be as complex as the individuals who make up the AAPS community. Let's collect then connect some dots rather than balk at the complexity. Intellectual growth and learning are more subjective than MEAP scores and cannot be weighed like meat, although gross wholesale quantitative methods should be a part of that evaluation. At the risk of sounding like I'm just punting here, let me throw a few items into the mix:

About 50% of all new teachers leave the profession within their first three years (UM College of Ed factoid). For various reasons, the flow of new blood and energy into public education is not what it should be. The new teachers I've seen who are staying are excellent... they are truly on a mission and have the fire in their bellies that this job requires.

Parent surveys consistently show that 80+% of parents are satisfied with THEIR child's teacher, but OTHER teachers get only about a 50% approval rating. Interestingly, these numbers hold true over time (ie, even after THEIR teacher becomes anOTHER teacher). It's as if after the school year ends, that special teacher disappears into some sort of amorphous system called "education", and as we've all been told, "education" is failing our kids. And, to be honest, in some ways education is failing our kids. Some of our educational methods and structures are echoes of the industrial models from the 50's and 60's. We (all of us, as in "public" education) can do better. Educational "reform" may mean little more than cutting salaries and benefits to some, but it means something quite different to me and others within the profession. I'll wait for the "reform" issue to come around again before I rant away at that.

Regarding "step pay" (seniority raises) from Mr. Jesse's article: One person commented that teachers should not get an annual raise for merely "not getting fired". I suppose that "not getting fired" is one way of looking at gaining valuable experience. Step raises are relatively small and are used to drown out the siren songs of less stress and more pay elsewhere while recognizing and compensating experience. Most people would choose an experienced teacher over an inexperienced one, and would agree that experienced teachers are necessary to mentor those new to the profession in any district. I've been in AAPS for 11 years and have learned a lot while I "just" wasn't getting fired.

I'd like to zoom in on the issue of teacher pay by taking one step back. My bet is that if you polled AAPS central administrators and trustees and gave them the choice of controlling salary costs or benefit costs (health insurance and contributions to the state retirement fund... health care again), 101% would choose benefits. And that discussion typically takes two paths:

1) Keep the current system and cut benefits as we go along to minimize having to make painful Sophie's Choices... why should one group get to keep their benefits while others are losing theirs? Ultimately, that path entertains the argument that lower standards of living are better. Let the downward spiral to the bottom begin, and let the last one with benefits turn off the lights on the way out. This is the path we find ourselves on now. Staying afloat is becoming the new "progress".

2) Develop a system that supports adequate, sustainable benefits in a manner that maximizes cost efficiencies. If we want to discuss educational reform or teacher compensation meaningfully, we must start with health care reform at the national level for the very same reason that GM must take $2000 of health care and retirement benefits out of every car in order to be globally competitive. The same applies to every business and government service in America. The issue of health care affects the national economy, affects the state's budget, affects the education grants, affects every child's classroom experience. This is not to divert the discussion away from local teacher compensation to where it gets lost in a national issue; this is to address the local pay issue by recognizing one of its ultimate and inescapable sources rather than discussing it symptomatically.

Teacher compensation (and more broadly, education) can be viewed merely as a cost or as an essential economic and social investment. Market forces will win out in the end either way; how much do we want to "spend" as opposed to "invest"? If we reform educational methods WHILE we wring out the huge cost inefficiences inherent in our current health care system, then we'll be getting somewhere. One suggestion as to where to start with educational methods:

Read Mr. Jesse's other article in this blog's archive on building student/teacher relationships. Common sense (backed up by reams of quantitative research) overwhelmingly points to this as being an essential piece of "good teaching" and is a very loud drumbeat in the schools (even as we decrease the time available to accomplish it as we tighten our budget belts).

Future wish list: a state tax structure that invests in services and infrastructure to promote future growth rather than strangling it... much historical data from surrounding states shows that adequate (as opposed to excessive) taxation creates more per capita wealth than it takes in... our past decade of cuts have taken us well on the way to becoming an economic backwater... when will we stop "saving" our way to poverty?; foreign language training (including Chinese and Arabic) K-12; global civics class in HS (Humanities for the 21st Century?); more paperless student connectivity (teacher-moderated student learning communities/blogs online).

Rant over for now. I hope others join in. Thanks again to Mr. Jesse and the A2 News for providing this forum.

As noted above in the orginal post, I'm not paid with public money, so I'm not disclosing my salary, other than to say I don't come anywhere near to making the list we compiled.

I tried to find a good way of comparing what teachers make with other professions, but found it hard to do so. Each profession has its own variables.

You'll note in the main story that I talked to Sean McBrady, a young Ann Arbor teacher who said that if he was a lawyer, as he orginally planned, he'd be making three times as much in salary, but not be as happy.